My reviews of TV shows and movies

All Is Lost

Maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind when I watched this movie, but I really didn’t care for it. Castaway was excellent and I hoped this one would be as good. Unfortunately I found it overly long and frankly boring. A little bit of narration or inner monologue would have helped a great deal because a lot of what went on made no sense to me. Anything to give Redford’s character a bit of context would have been an improvement. He’s so static he doesn’t even have a name, making it difficult for the audience to care about him. He also appears to be the most inept sailor on the planet and it seems almost Darwinian that he should be removed from the gene pool. I like Robert Redford as an actor, especially in The Sting, but after an hour of watching him bumble about doing one stupid thing after another, I started questioning my own opinion. I probably shouldn’t judge Redford too harshly as the poor guy had practically nothing to work with, script wise. At least Tom Hanks got to talk to a volleyball! There is supposedly an allegorical quality to the story, and the ambiguous ending might support that theory, but allegories shouldn’t be so dull they put the audience to sleep. I usually like minimalist understated movies but I just couldn’t connect with this one. My attention kept drifting (pardon the pun) and I was unable to suspend my awareness of time passing. I’m sure this film has much to recommend it but it just wasn’t for me. – BETHANY

This is the most excitement in the whole movie and it only lasts a few minutes.

Well, the reason you didn’t see a point was because there wasn’t one. It was nothing but an existential waste of everyone’s time. Believe it or not, there are some Netflix users who disagreed so strongly with my review that they’d deliberately get my review pulled from the site by saying it was offensive. The movie was offensive, but not my review …

I think All is Lost might be a modern day version of The Emperor’s New Clothes. The people holding forth on how deep and artistic it is are only saying so because they think that’s what the upper crust thinks, so they’re really just trying to fit in and be thought an intellectual. It was hours and hours of absolutely mind numbing boredom. Do you think it’s possible Hollywood deliberately perpetrated such a “joke” on America?

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